Stuart Macbride - Blind Eye

Logan perched on the edge of the desk. 'Can't believe they left you here on your own to do all this. It's just not fair, is it?'

'Don't even try with the fake sympathy.' He clicked the button again, sending the print off to be evaluated against the database.

'Not even if I say "pretty please"?'

Bill gave an elaborate sigh, emptied the scanner, then started again with a new set of fingerprints. 'When I finish this one I'm going for a cup of coffee. While I'm away you can play on the machine to your heart's content. As long as you don't break anything.'

'But-'

'Final offer.'

'Done.'

How hard could it be? It turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. Scanning the print in had been easy enough, but getting the contrast up without losing detail on the whorls, loops and deltas wasn't. After five minutes of fiddling, Logan finally had something that looked like it would do. Then he tried to follow the hastily-scrawled instructions Bill had left him: rotating the fingerprint so it was the right way up, then taking the mouse and marking up the distinguishing features. Find the end of a ridge, mark the tail with a pointer, then drag the mouse back along the line, then do it again, and again, and again.

Finally, when the screen was covered in little red circles and blue lines, Logan tried to get the machine to search for a match. Then did a lot of swearing when it wouldn't. He was poking away at random buttons when Bill reappeared with a huge wax-paper cup of coffee from the canteen.

'You not finished yet?'

Logan jabbed with the mouse again. 'Bloody thing doesn't work…'

'You didn't follow the instructions, did you?' Bill shouldered him out of the way, clicked twice, punched a couple of numbers into the keyboard, then hit 'PROCESS RESULTS'. 'See, piece of cake.'

'How long?'

'Depends. The machine doesn't actually compare prints, it compares the relative distance between points and the direction of the tails. Hundreds of different permutations analysed against every fingerprint we have in the database.' He pulled Logan's sheet out of the scanner and swapped it for the next one in line. 'Anything up to an hour.'

'I'll come back in the morning.' Logan stopped past the lab to say a final good night to Samantha — no tongues — and then wandered down to DI Steel's office.

She was sitting in one of the visitor's chairs, squinting her way through a stack of crime reports, scribbling indecipherable notes on them in red biro.

Logan dumped the DNA file Samantha had given him on the inspector's desk. 'You got a DNA match.'

'Eh?' She looked up from her forms. 'Oh… who is it?'

He flipped through the pages till he got to the conclusions at the back. 'Someone called Derek Allan?'

'Oh bloody hell, that's all I need.' Then she went rummaging in her trouser pocket and pulled out a fifty-pence piece. 'Here, stick that in the swear box. Bottom desk drawer.'

Logan popped the inspector's money into the Quality Street tin. 'Thought you said you were giving up on the whole "new you" thing?'

'Aye, well…' She sniffed, and buried her head in the reports again. 'You thought any more about… what we talked about?'

'Ah, about that: maybe you'd be better off with Rennie?'

'Rennie? No' exactly grade-A genetic material, is he?'

'I just think it'd be…' Horrifying was the first word that sprang to mind. 'It'd be awkward, you and me working together if you were the… mother of my child?'

'Susan would be the mother.'

'So what would you be, the father?'

'The… I don't know, do I? All I'm asking for is a turkeybaster's worth of sperm. You probably wasted that much up in the storeroom-'

Logan's phone started ringing and he grabbed at the excuse. 'McRae.' He listened in silence for a minute, a smile slowly spreading across his face. Then he thanked the man on the other end and hung up. 'That was Bill from fingerprints. We've got a match on the petrol bomb. Kevin Murray — he got slashed last Friday night, four hoodies nearly cut his nose off.'

Steel grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair. 'Right, get a car and we'll go see what he's got to say for himself.'

Logan backed away. 'Oh no you don't: my shift finished two and a half hours ago. I'm going home.'

'Oh, don't be such a wimp. Don't see me sneaking off when there's work to be done, do you?'

'You spent all day snoring off a hangover! At least I've done some work today.'

She squinted at him, and Logan could almost hear the evil little cogs working in her brain. 'Be a shame,' she said at last, 'if anyone found out you and our friendly neighbourhood Goth were going at it in the IB lab like a couple of horny teenagers.'

'Not going to work.'

'All that forensic evidence compromised by your dirty little urges…'

'Even you're not that much of a bitch. And everything was in evidence bags, thank you very much.'

Steel drummed her fingers against the desktop. 'I'll sign off on your overtime?' 'Still say we should've got a warrant.' Logan looked up at the two-bedroom semi and locked the car door.

'Wah, wah, wah; I want a warrant; I want backup; my shift's over — I want to go home; boo-hoo.' Steel lit a cigarette and blew a small plume of smoke into the evening sky. 'If we'd sodded about waiting for a warrant we'd still be here at midnight.' She started up the short path to the front door. 'Well, come on then, don't want to keep you from your red-haired semen thief.'

'Will you stop that?'

'No' as if you're using the bloody stuff, is it?'

Logan leant on the doorbell. 'This is sexual harassment.'

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring…

A muffled voice came from inside, 'Just a minute.' And then the door opened, revealing a short, older woman with a wide face and an ugly haircut. But she had a lovely smile. 'Can I help you?'

The inspector nodded, 'Aye, Kevin Murray about?'

The woman ran an eye over Steel, then did the same with Logan. 'What's he done now?'

'He's won the National Lottery,' said Steel, 'we're here to give him his big cardboard cheque.' She sooked the last gasp from her fag, then pinged the stub away into the gutter. 'He in?'

The woman's face hardened — eyes thin slits, mouth turned down at the edges. She walked back into the house, motioning for them to follow. The sound of something sickeningly cheerful blared out from the lounge. A little girl and boy sat on the rug in front of the television, gazing with rapt attention at a singing warthog and meerkat.

Kevin Murray was slumped on the settee, a tin of lager dangling from the fingers of one hand.

The woman stepped in front of him, blocking his view of the TV. 'Kevin, it's the police.'

Kevin looked up, frowned, tried to focus, then gave up and had another swig from his can. His nose was hidden behind a wodge of bandages, a gauze pad held in place over his nostrils by a couple of ties that went all the way around his emaciated head. Another clump of gauze had been taped over his cheek, the white fabric stained with yellow and dark red blobs. 'Told you no' to open the door, Ma.' It sounded as if he had a heavy cold. 'Could be anyone, like.'

'We had a deal, Kevin: you could stay here if you kept out of trouble.'

He shrugged. 'No trouble, Ma, no trouble at all. Keepin' myself to myself, like. You know?'

Steel looked at the little kids watching the television for a moment. Then said, 'Can we have a word in the kitchen, Kevin?'

Kevin drained the last of his lager and belched. 'I'm comfy here.'

'Let's no' do this in front of the kids, eh?'

'Hey, no one's forcin' you to do anythin'. I've got no secrets from my wee angels. You wanna arrest me? You do it right here.'

His mother slapped him on the shoulder. 'Kevin, you promised me!'

'I never did nothin'.'